ABSTRACT
Much has been written about the inuence of El Lissitzky’s Wolkenbügel project on Rem Koolhaas’s design of the CCTV, as discussed in the previous chapter. Equally well known is the extent to which Zaha Hadid’s work, from her early pictorial drawings to her recent projects, is inuenced by the visual culture of constructivism. Most of what she has produced thus far enjoys a level of theatricality and abstraction comparable to El Lissitzky’s Proun. Central to this analogy is the creation of a dynamic visual eld composed of elementary geometries. Proun, however, primarily sought to demolish “pictures,” painting as such. El Lissitzky set the Proun in motion to move his work towards “neoplasticism.” Conceived from various viewpoints, the object-looking drawings of Proun represent nothing more than facilitating the transformation of materiality to an object. El Lissitzky wrote, “The forms with which the Proun assaults space are material, not aesthetic.”1 Obviously, there are aesthetics involved in Proun. And yet, what El Lissitzky’s statement meant was that aesthetics is not primarily driven by subjective desire and that Proun should be cleansed of any contextual or historical references.
